'Pudding Guy' still has miles to collect before he sleeps

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, February 2, 2003

Are you sitting down? Good. Now listen to this shocker: The Pudding Guy recently paid for airline tickets.

As you'll recall, the Pudding Guy, David Phillips, is the UC Davis civil engineer who parlayed 12,150 individual-size cups of Healthy Choice chocolate pudding into 1,253,000 frequent-flier miles three years ago. That was enough for 31 round-trip coach tickets to Europe, or 42 tickets to Hawaii, or 21 tickets to Australia, or 50 tickets anywhere in the United States. Could he possibly have used all those miles?

Hardly. In fact, through the crafty manipulation of several other promotions, Phillips, 38, now has more than 5 million miles in his accounts. That's worth 120 round-trip flights to Paris. It might be cheaper for American Airlines to just give him a 747.

"I've got a lot more miles than I need," he told me over the phone recently,

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"but not as many as I'd like. Collecting them is my hobby."

So why did Phillips spend his own money for tickets to Paris, Madrid and Rome? We'll get to that eventually.

Ever since he banked those 1.25 million miles by buying enough chocolate pudding -- $3,150 worth -- to fill his garage to the rafters, Phillips has become a cult hero to the obsessive subculture of people who scan the Internet looking for ways to amass frequent-flier miles. Adam Sandler's character in the recent Paul Anderson film, "Punch-Drunk Love," was based partly on Phillips.

"They hired me as consultant on the film," he said. "I got to hang out on set and ensure that the details of the pudding deal were correct. They paid me,

but they didn't have to. I would have done it for free."

The pudding caper didn't satisfy Phillips' craving for miles. He's always on the lookout for the next big score. "Because of my notoriety as the Pudding Guy," he said, "a lot of people tell me about things. I get e-mails from people. And it's my hobby to search the Internet. I thought the pudding thing would be a once-in-a-lifetime deal, but these great offers keep popping up." Many of them, he said, show up at www.flyertalk.com and www.webflyer.com.

Not long after banking his pudding miles, Phillips got wind of a particularly outrageous promotion: A consortium of Central and South American airlines was offering a million miles to anyone who flew 10 international segments on member airlines and four segments on partner airlines, rented a car from a partner agency and stayed three nights in partner hotels. Two thousand dollars worth of airline tickets and six harried days of flying netted Phillips his second million miles. (Please note that this and other promotions mentioned in this column have all expired.)

Last year he found an online promotion that paid out 115 miles for every dollar you spent on magazine subscriptions. "I bought a ton of subscriptions, and mostly donated them to libraries and schools," Phillips said. "I picked up about 300,000 miles out of that one."

When it came time to remodel his home, Phillips discovered that Home Depot was offering 1,000 miles to anyone who bought a $100 gift certificate. "I was going to spend the money anyway, so I bought myself $30,000 worth of gift certificates." Ka-ching! Another 300,000 miles in Phillips' accounts.

The Hilton hotel chain dangled 50,000 miles in front of anyone who stayed in four different properties, so Phillips cashed in a few of his miles for a round-trip ticket to New York and stayed in four different Hiltons in four nights. "I spent that whole trip checking in and out of hotels," he said. A small price to pay, apparently, for 50,000 more miles.

Phillips does occasionally get some pleasure out of his miles. Last year, for example, he took his wife, two kids, sister and parents to Playa del Carmen in the Yucatan. But he wouldn't spring for upgrades to business class. What -- do you think he's made out of miles?

"I'm still stingy about spending miles for business or first class," he said. "I don't want to spoil the kids. They don't need the extra space, and my wife and I are comfortable in coach."

Because he's got far more miles than vacation time, Phillips looks for creative ways to travel. He and his wife like to jet off to London for long weekends. "It's strange but pretty magical," he said. "We'll be at work, and then 24 hours later we'll be watching a London play. And then a day or two later we'll be back at work."

OK, but none of this explains why Phillips paid cash for airline tickets. Here's the deal: This past Thanksgiving, he got a tip that British Airways had a breathtaking glitch on its Web site.

"They were offering certain fares from the U.S. to Europe for only $20," he said. "And these were seats in their World Traveler section, which is halfway between coach and business class.

"The glitch only showed up in certain city pairs, but I kept plugging in itineraries and found a number of flights from San Francisco. I couldn't resist. I booked tickets for my family to go to Paris" -- he's there right now -- "and also to Madrid in February and Rome in March, with my sister and her whole family.

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"The glitch was only there for about six hours, but when British Airways discovered it they were gracious enough to honor the fares."

And through it all, Phillips never lost his taste for chocolate pudding. "I donated most of it to the Salvation Army, but I kept a few cases for myself. I threw out the last of it two years ago because it was starting to go bad. But if someone offered me some right now, I wouldn't turn it down. I really like the stuff."

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